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I`ll make millions from this, right?!?

6 years ago1,759 words

Memody: Sindrel Song is like 99% done now! I'll be starting testing sometime this week, or the weekend at the latest. As release looms closer than ever, I'm thinking a lot about how much money I could actually earn from this thing. Enough to keep doing it? I have no idea.

There's plenty in the game that still needs improving and refining, but most of what needs to be included to make it a full experience now is. Included. The only thing that I've still yet to do is an ending. Currently you finish the final song and it just stops (actually it crashes), which would be quite irritating to the testers who got that far! I've got some ideas how to handle it, but I'm not 100% certain about them. I like the idea of allowing the player to continue to explore the world and sing the songs after the end, to improve their scores, though in terms of lore it'll be the winter, and the world will be dead, so I can't have them take place in the same external areas. I know where they could take place instead (a new cave), but it'll take a bit of work to set it up as I have in mind.

Now that the release is so close, I'm wondering what outcome is reasonable to expect. At first, months ago, I got excited about the idea of "making millions!!", and I think my step-dad is still expecting that, but I know that's a delusion. There are so many games out there, and so few of them do well. But I've no idea what I can expect for something like this.

The way I've been seeing it (or trying to), there are a lot of mediocre games out there that have teams working on them for months, and they make enough money to support the entire team somehow. Maybe. Since I'm just one person, I wouldn't have to share my earnings with a team, so it wouldn't have to do as well to keep me afloat. Plus I'd hope that the care and heart I've put in might elevate it above the swarms of soulless cash-grabs clogging up the system. Perhaps. Maybe its themes and idiosyncrasies will be resonant and interesting enough for it to be shared by word of mouth, too. Maybe it'll be worth writing articles about? I feel like my backstory might play a role there too. "He made it all by himself while recovering from brain cancer!" Hmm.

I have an existing reputation, too, though I'm wondering whether that'll help or harm things. It'd be awful if this were shot down because it's not MARDEK 4.

So I'm wondering what's reasonable to expect. Apparently, according to Google, the minimum wage for one month is £1309 in the UK. Let's say this whole thing has taken six months, including the release phase I'll have to tackle next. Working six months at a crappy minimum wage job would have earned me £7854. If I were a complete NEET, scrounging off the government, I could get "between £23.20 and £148.85 a week" from disability benefits (for my SEVERE MENTAL ILLNESSES AND BRAIN CANCER), and I don't understand the other benefits, since I've never looked into them and would rather not go down that path, but a quick search suggests I could get "up to £73.10" per week, though I'd also have to actively be looking for a job. And the only jobs I could likely get as a 31-year-old mentally ill person who's never had formal employment before would likely be entry-level things like working in McDonalds, which I probably couldn't cope with anyway because, as I may or may not have mentioned before, I'm quite mentally ill.

I'm making £10,000 my aim. That's about $13,000US. If I only made that amount from this, I can't pretend I wouldn't be disappointed. But then again, I probably made something like that - probably less, actually - from MARDEK 3, after three years of work (which is the biggest reason I didn't continue with it), so anything more than that would be something, at least. The world's changed a lot since then, though; now I'll actually be able to earn money for selling my games directly.

And I don't need to sell that many to make a decent profit. If I sold it for, say, $6, then to get $13000, 'just' 2166 people need to buy it. Well, more, since a share of the profits would go to the various stores that'll host it; let's say 3000. 4000? That doesn't seem like a huge amount of people to me.

I think I've been spoiled by the reaction MARDEK got though. Literally millions of plays, across multiple websites. If just a tiny fraction of those had paid for it, I'd have been set for a long time. But if they had to pay for it, then I can't imagine the number of players would even be close to that. Maybe just getting 100 people paying would be remarkable? I've no idea. I know I got a lot of fanmail from people telling me that they loved MARDEK because it was all they could play when their parents couldn't afford to buy 'real' games for them.

All this is something I think about all the time, the relative attention of things... I remember my pre-MARDEK days on deviantART, where I'd be overjoyed if I woke up one morning and saw I had a single comment on something I'd made. Wow! Amazing! Someone cared enough to share some words! Then came MARDEK, with its millions of players. Now, I'm really embarrassed that these blog posts get well under 1000 views. Lots of people in the world might be really proud of that kind of attention! I come across a lot of blogs while searching that have 0 comments on all their posts. That's surely more common than not. And I'd bet that most YouTube videos, from ordinary people, get less than 1000 views in their entire lifetime too. I don't look at my YouTube uploads because I'm afraid of how few views they'll surely have. But then it also seems like a surprising amount of people have hundreds or thousands of social media followers?

So I don't know... I'm not doing any of this to maximise profits or anything. I don't care about earning millions. I'd probably be overwhelmed by the stress of that kind of attention anyway, these days! I just want to earn enough that I could pay the bills, enough that I don't have to either get some awful job I hate, live on the dole, or kill myself. I know a lot of people out there have to do those things because their life situations offer no alternatives (yes, they have to kill themselves, of course), but I suppose this feels different because of all the factors involved, all the effort, so... well. I just hope it pays off.

Something I've been thinking about doing is posting openly about how much I make from it exactly, so there's no mystery there. Let's see how it goes.

Recently, I watched the film Kong: Skull Island, just because I try to keep up with the Hollywood Blockbusters, usually months or years late (it's why I watched the X-men films recently). That had a budget of $185 million, and earned $566 million. "That's not all that much really", I thought; "I wonder if they're disappointed?" I had in mind the billion-breakers; obviously because some films earn that, it should be the amount to expect, right?? Anything less is a failure, surely! In the Wikipedia article's critical response section, there's this line:

Several critics have commented on [Brie] Larson's role in the movie, as she had recently won an Academy Award for Room, with Michael Salfino of The Wall Street Journal remarking that "a starring role in a popcorn movie on the heels of a passion project can open up an actor to ridicule."

(Also it was weird seeing her and Samuel L Jackson alongside each other in this after seeing Captain Marvel... Plus Loki, too. And Wreck-It Ralph, and Sully the monster. So few people in this world of billions, recurring again and again...)

I'd never heard of "Room" (not THE Room, which is basically a meme). Apparently it had a budget of $13 million and earned $36.3 million. I saw that and imagined the embarrassment of the creators for making such a 'small' amount, which is absurd... That's a huge amount compared to anything except those ludicrous blockbusters. It's interesting though that it made so little because it was a 'passion project' that lacked populist appeal. There are tons of art house films out there that earn much less, too. Since I do try to keep up with films, I tend to look at Wikipedia's articles like ∞ 2018 in film ∞. I haven't even heard of most of the films that come out. Most of them probably don't do too well at all, compared to, say, Avengers: Endgame. But they do well enough to support everyone involved, which is the important thing.

It's the same with games too, of course. For all the Fortnites and Breath of the Wilds and etc, there are a ton of things like what I make, by indie studios or solo developers. I wonder how many of them do so poorly their creators have to just give up. I've been thinking that if I do make enough to keep doing this, I'd like to look into those kinds of games more often, posting 'reviews' of them on this blog to raise awareness about them and to get inspired by their often quirky ideas. The only reason I haven't already is because of CRIPPLING INSECURITY - I'm worried I'll compare my work to theirs and feel demotivated - but as I'll be facing a lot of mental challenges during this release, perhaps I'll experience some personal growth that'll leak into other aspects of my life too.

But we'll see how it goes. Writing this took longer than expected, as usual. I need to add this ending... Perhaps I'll spend tomorrow on it actually, so then I'm not rushing it too much, then I'll start testing on Thursday. Unless I get it done tonight. We'll see.



Oh, I also added a basic layout for ∞ alorafane.com ∞... and the amazing, totally real quote reviews I've included for Sindrel Song made me laugh more than I have in ages, perhaps because deep down I dread I'll actually get feedback like that.